Charm & Chill

DEVIL BY THE SEA (224 pp.)--Nina Bawden--Lippincott ($3.50).

Girt with a boyish garb for boyish task,

Eager she wields her spade: yet loves as well

Rest on a friendly knee, intent to ask

The tale he loves to tell.

That is how nymphet-nuzzling Victorian Lewis (Alice in Wonderland) Carroll evoked a little girl's seaside idyl. The lines might well apply to nine-year-old Hilary Bray and her discovery, in Devil by the Sea, that little girls who walk along the shore can expect to find more than sand castles. The friendly knee that innocent Hilary encounters is the shank of an old derelict whom she meets at the amusement park in her seaside home town of Henstable. Later that afternoon Hilary sees the old man lead another little girl across the marshes. Watching his "clumsy horror, the surgical boot, the clubfoot," she decides that he is the Devil. When she reads in the paper that the little girl has been murdered, Hilary is sure "the Devil" did it.

The certainty is the more horrible because her family will not believe her story of the crime. They first ignore, then mock her. "Hilary, I hate a liar," says her father. Her wambly, 17-year-old stepsister Janet is too busy with a married schoolmaster to watch over her charge. Auntie Florence, nearly 80, who combs the beach for "anything and everything" and hides her treasure in a cave, is absorbed in herself. Only Hilary's younger brother Peregrine, whom she alternately pets and patronizes, shares her "delicious fearfulness." But eventually even he fails her. And when Hilary's father finally realizes that the girl was right about the murder, it is too late; he dies of a heart attack.

In the end, Hilary's need for affection overcomes even her terror of the "Devil." When she meets him again in a field beyond the Downs, she smiles in welcome and he invites her to his trailer. The last part of Novelist Bawden's melodrama is dominated by the cliffhanging question of what will happen to Hilary in that trailer.

The story of a child who witnesses a crime and cannot make the adult world understand has been written before, but rarely so well. Devil by the Sea is the season's most chilling tale, and British Novelist Bawden tells it with the devil's own gift of gab and style. She can charm as well as chill. The innocent childhood scenes she sets down, in contrast to the mounting horror in the background, are as engaging as any of the beach idyls sketched by Lewis Carroll.

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